Andy's Blog

"Hey, hey!" said Eric*, sauntering into the park. "What up, my Smurfs?"   The tiny, blue folk collectively stopped what they were doing and gaped at him in shock. Brainy Smurf gasped. Weepy Smurf burst into tears.   "What?" Eric asked, "What, uh ... what is actually up? What's wrong?"   "You can't say that!" scolded Smurfette. "We can say that! You can't! You can't ever say that!"   "You don't have S-word privileges," Papa Smurf added firmly, though not without his characteristic gentleness.   "What?" said Eric. "I don't - I've said it before! I've said 'smurf' lots of times!"   "You've said smurf, and smurf," corrected Brainy Smurf, "And because you're a friend, we've even let you say Smurf."   "But if we're to remain friends," Papa continued, "you must never say Smurf."   Eric considered this...

The Huffington Post is reminding us that Facebook Messenger asks for a lot of permissions when you install it . On the one hand, the article is kind of alarmist. It needs permission to do all those things because it is designed to be able to do all those things - you can use your Messenger app to manage your SMSs and make phone calls and so on and so forth. It wants to be your social hub or whatever. But, at the same time, it's absolutely right that once you've given it permission to do these things IT CAN DO THEM AT ANY TIME. It's sort of the same principle as the legal T&C thing that went around a couple of years ago - people were startled to find that Google, Flickr etc were being granted the right to distribute your images, despite that being exactly what the relevant services were designed to do. But, yes, once they have permission to do that, they can totally do that, and it's a permission that could be abused. Unfortunately (unlike apps running on Faceboo...

  "Good morning, sir, I'm calling from RTA Legal Solutions as a follow-up call, regarding a transport incident you may have been involved in."   "Oh really, do go on."   "Yes sir, a claim was filed for damages following the incident."   "When was this?"   "Within the last three years, sir."   "You're going to have to be more specific than that."   "Well, this is the question, sir."   "Ah, so you don't have a specific incident in mind? You're just fishing."   "Not at all, sir, we don't fish, I actually take exception at the use of that word -"   "No, you have cold called me and are now trying to trick me into giving up information. Your use of the phrase 'follow-up' suggested a pre-existing relationship, when in fact -"   "It is a follow-up, there are people in need of legal advice and - I don't have to listen to this from you -"   ...

Been thinking about Emmett from the Lego Movie. Spoilers, duh.

Back in the mists of time, Companies on Facebook would run promotions where you could share their content in order to enter a competition - effectively getting customers to advertise their product in exchange for the chance of winning one. Advertising costs were slashed, and everyone was happy. Then Facebook said to themselves, "Hang about, why are we letting customers advertise products for free, when we can totally charge them for that?" So they added the option for companies to pay them money in exchange for increased visibility. The Companies said to Facebook, "You are having a laugh, why would we pay you to do this when we can get punters to do it for free?" and continued with their viral-style promotions. The cunning Facebook replied, "Because we have made it illegal under our terms and conditions .  Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions.  See, right there." "Oh," swore the Companies, and scratched their head ...

I played through the "Beyond: Two Souls" demo this weekend. Yahtzee's review seems pretty fair - it's an extended quick time event disguised as an awkward, disconcerting, hard-to-control shambles of a game. Bumming around as a ghost could have been fun if it wasn't so fiddly and, bizarrely, restricted; the ghost-centric demo level was initially fun but it soon became apparent that it was really a matter of sweeping the area for all the little interaction hot spots, then moving the joysticks in or out or down, and sometimes (if it's a "possession" hot spot) tapping a few prompted buttons. There was no sense that I could properly roam and chuck shit about at will. On the other hand, the human-centric sequence is (as Yahtzee says) confused and disorienting. The camera switches angles as dramatically appropriate, which is nice and cinematic, but when running down a train it leaves you confused about which way you've just come (and when driving a ...

It's fairly obvious that "Pick" - formerly PickTV - is the Sky-run freeview channel; Wikipedia confirms my suspicion that it is simply a rebranded Sky 3. I wonder why they changed the name? I guess either "Sky 3" tested poorly - people thought it was third-class or third-rate or just generally offcuts - or they wanted to trick people into watching what they thought was an independent channel so they could bombard them with adverts for other fine Sky products at a discount rate. And wow, what does it say about the broadcasting industry that it is cheaper to buy your own channel than it is to buy advertising space on somebody else's? Anyway, I only mention this because they've recently been pushing this thing called "Moonfleet". I don't know anything else about the show. I believe it involves boats. An advert in my news feed suggests it contains Ray Winstone. Whatever. The important thing is it's called Moonfleet. Moooooonfleeet. ...